Actually these days anything too much below the speed of the lowest athlon XP is actually more expesive. At this point, brand name DDR can be more cheaply at FSB speeds higher than what you actually need (I recently bought 400Mhz rather than 266 for this reason). and actually Pc-133 sdrams are getting more expensive every week.
On a budget, I would suggest you buy a mobo with the processor already installed. And try to find one with onboard lan and sound(most new ones come with it anyway now). It is usually cheaper this way and the onboard components are decent and usually a standard chipset. Ye be warned however not to get onboard video IMO, as it probably won't work with TVs or aracde monitors very well, and even if it does, it means you don't get an AGP slot and usually the cards suck anyway. Also, when it comes to memory, most name brands have something called a value line, and if uber(and i stress uber
) performance is not an issue it is cheaper. The only difference really is something called the CAS latency and is not important for most users to worry about.
I can see why you would suggest a bigger HD just to prevent people from upgradeing but if one is writting a FAQ i don't think you should say you NEED a 60GB HD when at the time you can really get by with a 40GB. Yes there little difference in price between the two now days, but I think it should be noted on what is requried and what is suggested.
The Difference in price on these things now-a-days is like $10(less than the cost of shipping on some websites). A lot of retail stores don't even sell anything less than 80GB as well. My advise to people who don't know what to buy has always been to buy slightly more than you think you need. This may only mean buying a machine with 10% extra if prices are prohibitive. It is my experience that boxes get outdated pretty fast. If you really don't need the space then don't get it though.
I personally am going to use an old box for the one I will be building though. I am going to build a new computer for my main one and then put the old one in my cabinet.
So I guess maybe I just broke my own rule
. And ignore this of course If you only want to play older games. Actually if I am too poor by the end of the project, I may just use an old 1Ghz computer that I am running Solaris on. But I digress...
If you decide to go the network route for transfering files to your cabinet, you may also decide to make it a personal file-server(standard windows peer-peer networking is sufficient). If you can't think of what you would use it for then you probably wouldn't use it. But it can save storage space if you use a lot of files in different places. This is important for me at least, because I am a hard-drive hog and I have a lot of computers and limited space. Just something to consider, but only makes sense if you already use at least 2-3 computers already.
Anyway, save those cpu cycles when you aren't playing games. I am getting off topic here so I am going to stop. I'm talking about brand name brand name parts here bought on the internet (try
www.newegg.com they are cheap and reputable).
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Topic: The "What PC do I need to run MAME?" Official FAQ (Read 68213 times)
